It begins with knowing and not knowing, Richmond Art Gallery

空间的拥抱 | To hold myself | Clay, water, video projection | 2024

In times of change and uncertainty, I continually grow, stretch and shape myself to find a space that I can inhabit in the present. In this performance-installation, I compress clay between index finger and thumb, or between palm and the curve of a knee, making vessels that mirror and record the physical space of my body.

Heated in the kiln just enough to hold their form, theses vessels are stained by every drop of water received. I often water these vessels in my studio. Even in the gallery, I can’t bear to see them on pedestals, pinned by the weight of history. 

I hide a watering can behind the gallery. Every now and then, I come to water these vessels. They begin to weep and seep, but they also hold. Zoe Sofia once wrote that containment is not just about what houses us, but what we put our stuff into, and thereby identify with; what of ourselves we can and cannot contain.

If these vessels reflect my body back to me, maybe their porosity reveals what of my self I cannot contain. 

花痕修补 | Pressing into cracks and blooms | Inkjet prints on cotton rag paper (clay, traditional Chinese medicine, rice paper) | 2022-present

Since 2022, I’ve made thousands of unfired clay bowls to meditate on how to experience the present moment more deeply. Each bowl was filled with traditional Chinese medicine upon drying. Held within porous clay walls, the vivid medicine inevitably seeps through, eroding or breaking the bowls. In making this work, I practiced accepting uncertainty and change. I learned to be with the fear and discomfort of being on the cusp of transformation. Sometimes existing structures need to rupture to allow new possibilities to arise.